Spruce Is An Evergreen Beauty From The Forest. Christmas Tree. Kinds. Description And Photo

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Spruce Is An Evergreen Beauty From The Forest. Christmas Tree. Kinds. Description And Photo
Spruce Is An Evergreen Beauty From The Forest. Christmas Tree. Kinds. Description And Photo

Video: Spruce Is An Evergreen Beauty From The Forest. Christmas Tree. Kinds. Description And Photo

Video: Spruce Is An Evergreen Beauty From The Forest. Christmas Tree. Kinds. Description And Photo
Video: Oregon Conifers 2024, March
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It is hardly possible to find an adult, let alone a baby, indifferent to this wonderful evergreen plant. The most cheerful New Year holiday is unthinkable without a fluffy, elegant Christmas tree sparkling with lights. Since 1700 we have celebrated this wonderful holiday. Even if you have to decorate a pine or fir for the New Year's celebrations, they are still called a Christmas tree. Our sailors, who often celebrate the New Year in distant tropical or southern latitudes, often have to decorate a ficus or palm tree, but even then a Christmas tree stands before their eyes - a piece of their native land, the fluffy beauty of our forests.

Norway spruce, or European
Norway spruce, or European

Content:

  • Spruce use
  • Types of spruce
  • Spruce in the forest
  • Spruce growth
  • Spruce flowering
  • Spruce life span

Spruce use

Foresters have a special feeling for spruce. Although they share with all people the joy of New Year's fun, they humanly feel sorry for their plants cut down so early. After all, in fact, a mighty spruce tree, which every Christmas tree could become over time, is ruining, and an adult spruce tree is a whole wealth. Spruce logs are used for the finest grades of paper, rayon, wool, leather, alcohols, glycerin and plastics. One cubic meter of spruce wood can be turned into six hundred suits, or 4000 pairs of viscose socks, or sleepers, containers.

Often the spruce is also called a musical tree. Its white, slightly shiny wood is indispensable for making musical instruments. That is why foresters are afraid of New Year's celebrations and seek support from the chemistry miracle worker. After all, she is able to "grow" Christmas trees no less beautiful than in nature, and besides, they are also durable: artificial trees can serve as an ornament for several years. But foresters don't just rely on chemists. Every year, on special plantations, they grow more and more elegant, fluffy New Year beauties to the delight of people without damaging the forest.

Blue spruce, or prickly spruce
Blue spruce, or prickly spruce

Types of spruce

With the greatest zeal, foresters grow ate in earnest, for centuries. Here they work selflessly. Therefore, from year to year, more and more spruce trees are found on a vast territory from the Kola Peninsula to the South Urals and the Carpathians. Among them, of course, prevailing spruce, or European, naturally growing in these open spaces. It is now artificially grown in the arid steppes of Ukraine, for example, in Askania-Nova, and on the southern coast of Crimea, and in Central Asia.

Other species of spruce, and there are as many as 45, freely settled on the territory of three continents: in Europe, Asia and North America. Among them are Finnish and Siberian spruce, Korean and Tien Shan, Japanese and Indian, Canadian and Serbian, black and red.

Almost every species has decorative forms, isolated in the process of their centuries of cultivation. Whoever has seen it will not forget the beautiful trees with a weeping or columnar crown, with blue, silver or golden needles, with branches creeping along the ground or with unusually colored cones. But let's get to know our evergreen beauty better.

Spruce in the forest

Have you ever looked closely at the life of a spruce forest? Our common, or European, spruce grows in the forests sometimes in the vicinity of birch, aspen, pine, and in more southern regions - with oak and linden. But most often it forms continuous, as foresters say, clean spruce forests, without admixture of other species.

Particularly interesting are the dense green moss spruce forests with a thick velvety carpet of green mosses. In them, in any weather, undisturbed tranquility and mysterious twilight reign. "The darkness is eternal here, a great mystery, the sun does not bring rays here," Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov wrote about these severe spruce forests.

You walk in such a forest, walk on a springy powerful carpet of mosses, and around, as in a fairy-tale kingdom, branches of giant fir trees, hung with shaggy garlands of gray lichens. Here and there, the mighty trunks of spruce are scattered randomly, defeated by storm and time. Huge flat root umbrellas are uprooted by mighty force from the ground, moss and lichens cover and entangle the fallen giants.

In such a forest, you cannot find undergrowth of shrubs, and only in small glades (windows) are squat bushes of blueberries, densely covered with bluish berries, small islets of sour cherry or evergreen wintergreen. High stems of ferns with thin patterned leaves are arched around them. In the second half of summer, these few inhabitants of the spruce forest are joined by mushrooms bright against the background of a green carpet: red fly agarics, light yellow mushrooms, white milk mushrooms.

Under the canopy of age-old spruce trees, you can find only frail dwarf Christmas trees: their trunks are slightly thicker than a pencil, and the branches form a small flat crown, the size of an ordinary umbrella. The fate of these tiny trees is amazing. For dozens of years they vegetate in the shade of mighty congeners of spruce, reaching a height of only about a meter over the years.

So most of them die off from an extreme lack of light after half a century, or even a century of existence. But it is worth cutting down a few giant spruce trees, illuminating, in the terminology of foresters, the spruce undergrowth, as old-timers-dwarfs immediately wake up. As if in a hurry to make up for lost time over a period of many years of oppression, they grow vigorously, reaching over time the usual sizes for spruce.

Only a forester, decades later, examining the cross-section of an old sawn spruce, can read the unusual story of her childhood and adolescence. For non-specialists, an adult spruce that has grown from a dwarf tree is difficult to distinguish from other trees.

Eastern spruce (Eastern spruce)
Eastern spruce (Eastern spruce)

Spruce growth

Spruce is known to be considered an evergreen species. This is both true and not true. The spruce needles are not eternal. After all, the needles, having served their service, fall off after 7-9 years. Every autumn, the spruce drops at least one seventh of the needles, almost invisibly, gradually changing its evergreen outfit. This process is difficult for the untrained eye to notice. But the growth of young needles is easy to notice. It is especially good to observe it in the second half of May. At this time, against the background of old dark green needles from the terminal buds of the shoots, thin orange outgrowths appear, completely dressed with young emerald spines.

Shoots from apical buds grow especially intensively. In just two weeks, they are able to stretch often up to half a meter. However, by the middle of summer, growth usually stops and new buds are laid at the ends of the shoots, which awaken only in the spring of next year.

The spruce not only annually increases the layer of wood, clearly visible on the cross-section of the trunk, but also forms a new tier of whorl-branches, horizontally spread in all directions. These whorls can be used to calculate the age of the spruce during its lifetime. Only to the number of years determined in this way, it is necessary to add another 3-4 years. It is at this age that the spruce forms the first tier of whorl branches.

A sawn or felled spruce tree not only has more accurate metas, by which one can accurately judge its age. Its annual rings, clearly visible in the cross section, can tell a lot. Looking at and studying them, they learn not only about the duration, but also about the nature of the tree's entire life. You can find out, for example, in the open space or in the dense thicket of the forest a tree has lived a long life, in what climatic conditions it happened to grow, how generously the sun illuminated it, what storms and fires it survived, and much more.

It is also interesting to observe the settlement of a spruce cutting area - a site of a felled spruce forest. Immediately after felling, it is completely overgrown with wildly developing grasses. The tall reed grass with large lilac flower panicles and pink-flowered willow tea are especially successful. Following the grasses, the trees - aspen, birch, pine - seem to be racing to take more of the vacant space.

The spruce, it seems, is deliberately in no hurry to take part in this peculiar competition. Although it is considered a breed that easily tolerates cold winters, its seedlings, like young shoots, are severely frozen over during spring frosts. Therefore, spruce rarely settles in open cutting areas at the same time as other species.

Most often, after the nimble neighbors grow up and become reliable protection from spring frosts, the spruce also begins to slowly but steadily gain momentum and in the future, as a rule, outgrows its patrons. Over time, it drowns out more and more, and then completely survives all other breeds.

The victory of the spruce in such a struggle is usually undivided and final. But it happens that she also fails to settle under the canopy of pioneer trees (aspen, birch) or to break through their thicket to the sun.

Norway spruce, or European
Norway spruce, or European

Spruce flowering

Have you ever seen a spruce flowering? In a dense forest, it is first observed only in trees at the age of 30, or even 40 years. In the park, spruce trees often bloom at 12-15 years of age. Usually at the end of May or a little earlier, many lateral branches of the spruce crown are densely colored with bright crimson spikes. These are male flowers. At the tops of such trees, female flowers appear simultaneously in the form of red-green cones sticking upward. Clouds of golden spruce pollen, driven by warm gusts of spring wind, rush to them.

At the height of flowering, they form a light, almost continuous veil of pollen fog in the spruce forest. Male flowers, having lost the pollen, immediately fade, lose their attractiveness, and the pollinated female cones become heavy, sag and gradually acquire an increasingly brown hue. So they hang-ripen on the treetops all summer, autumn and winter.

Only at the beginning of the next spring, in mid-April, do they begin to shed their first spruce seed. Experts say that mature forest often disperses up to 20 kilograms of seeds per hectare, which is a seeding rate of up to 5 million seeds, an average of 200 seeds per cone.

Each spruce seed is equipped with a small rounded sail wing. The seed picked up by air currents or the wind, like a glider, hovers in the air for a long time, smoothly sinking onto snow that has hardened by spring or is covered with an ice crust. Caught up in the drifting snow, it glides easily and quickly for tens of kilometers already on the crust.

True, the tree organizes these "Winter Olympic Games" not annually, but, as is customary in sports, usually in 4-5 years. The fact is that they ate flowering and fruiting at intervals, as a rule, of four to five years. In addition to the main distributor of spruce seeds - the wind, forest inhabitants also actively help the tree: squirrels, chipmunks, and especially spruce crossbills. All of them willingly feast on spruce seeds, often carrying them far from the mother trees.

One way or another, the spread seeds, falling into favorable conditions, germinate together. Foresters successfully use seeds to grow seedling trees in nurseries, from which they are then transplanted to cutting areas. The spruce young growth, nurtured by a caring human hand, subsequently takes a place in newly created forests or parks, and is built as a dense wall of living protection near railways and highways.

Tien Shan spruce (Schrenk's Spruce)
Tien Shan spruce (Schrenk's Spruce)

Spruce life span

Scientists believe that the average life span of ate is 250-300 years, and the largest trees live up to 500 years. In the vast expanses of our Motherland, nature has preserved many giant firs, the age of which is estimated at 300-400 years. Until recently, one of these giant fir trees grew in the Moscow region, near Zvenigorod, and only an extraordinary force of lightning split the mighty trunk.

Numerous admirers of the talent of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin are examining with interest a large old densely-crowned tree, a spruce tent, planted in Mikhailovsky Park by his grandfather, Osip Abramovich Hannibal. They say that the poet was very fond of spending time with this original spruce.

Spruce grows gigantic in size in Czechoslovakia near the town of Banska Bystrica. Czechoslovakian foresters have determined that the tree is 430 years old. The mighty trunk of the patriarch-spruce, as the locals call it, spread out to the sides, making up 6 meters in a circle, and the top is rustling with emerald needles somewhere on a level with the roof of a high-rise 30-storey building.

Representatives of the spruce tribe are also blue spruces (botanists call them prickly). They stand like evergreen sentries on Red Square near the Lenin Mausoleum and along the memorial Kremlin wall.

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